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PARTISAN REVIEW
Abnormality.
She sees the formation of symptoms as crucial in helping such
a numbed psyche survive-especially when the alternative is life-endan–
gering psychosomatic illness, where the numbed psyche becomes driven to
use the body mutely to communicate pain. McDougall helps such people
ward off dangerous psychosomatosis with verbally-based, protective symp–
toms of neurosis. Once a neurosis is formed, McDougall then gradually
helps bring the defended psyche to the true and flexible symbolization
processes we call health.
Like most analysts today, particularly those who focus on narration and
symbolization, McDougall is very careful not to use diagnostic categories
to
describe people. Instead, in her fascinating books
Theaters OJThe Mind
and
Theaters OJ
77u
Body,
she elaborates a theater metaphor both for
understanding failures in symbolization processes and for describing the
inner voyages she and her patients go on to recover them:
In taking the theater as a metaphor for psychic reali
ty,
I am hoping
to avoid the standard psychiatric and psychoanalytic classification of
clinical entities. These terms apply to symptoms, not to people. To
designate someone as a "neurotic," a "psychotic," a " pervert," or a
"psychosomatic" is li ttle more than name-calling and is inadequate to
describe anything as complex and subtle as a human personali
ty.
It not
only fosters the illusion that we have said something pertinent about
somebody, but implies that the rest of us are free of the psychic dramas
that lie behind the symptoms to which these terms refer.
Each secret-theater self is ... engaged in repeatedly playing roles
from the past, using techniques discovered in childhood and repro–
ducing, wi th uncanny precision, the same tragedies and comedies,
with the same outcomes and identical quota of pain and pleasure.
What were once attempts at self-cure in the face of mental pain and
conflict are now symptoms that the adult
I
produced, following for–
gotten childhood solutions. The resulting psychic scenarios may be
called neuroses or narcissistic disorders, addictions or perversions, psy–
choses or psychosomatoses, but they originate from our childlike
I's
need to protect itself from psychic suffering.
The analyst symbolically enters the analysand's poetic dramas wi th the
view of helping to re-write them, so they do not remain fIxed unconscious
guides for constricted living.
In
order to do this safely, analysts must have
an intimate knowledge of their own "inner characters and secret scenar–
ios" which comes from their own analysis and subsequent self-analysis.
The analyst, in effect, has to be analyzing two people in the session, the
